Cut through a saturated election news cycle without adding to the noise. No white papers, no fact-checks, no thirty-point plan. The material already existed — Trump had spent years using "dog" as his go-to word for contempt: rivals "fired like a dog," staffers "choked like a dog" under pressure, a dropout who "dropped out like a dog," a dead terrorist who "died like a dog." Nobody had put it in one place. And nobody had connected it to the other fact sitting right next to it: he's the first president in over a hundred years without a dog in the White House.

The challenge was building something out of that connection strong enough to run on its own, without needing anyone to explain the joke.

I concepted Trump Hates Dogs and oversaw execution from there: creative direction, the edit, and building out the site and social presence the campaign lived on.

The rule we set for ourselves: his words, and only his words. No voiceover, no narrator, no added copy telling people what to think. Every quote is real, pulled from his own rallies, interviews, and Twitter, laid over footage of dogs and nothing else. If it wasn't something he actually said, it didn't go in.

That restraint was the whole strategy. The second you put a narrator over it, it becomes an ad making an argument, and people know how to tune those out. Leave it as just him talking and a dog on screen, and it becomes something closer to evidence. The audience does the work of connecting his words to the pups on screen themselves, which lands harder than anything we could have written for them.

No paid media behind it, and it still found an audience: thousands of organic views and shares off the site and social handles alone, entirely word of mouth. People passed it around because it didn't feel like being pitched to. It gave voters a way into the candidate that wasn't another policy argument: purely character driven, built entirely from things he'd actually said, reaching people who'd already tuned out the usual case against him. A different angle on the same conversation everyone else was having, and one that spread because it came from the ground up, not from a media buy.